Home Is Where We Start cover art

Home Is Where We Start

Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

 Preview

Get 30 days of Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30-day free trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options
Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A Guardian book to look out for for 2024

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years.

While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys, never knowing when they opened doors whether they’d find violent political debates or couples writhing under sheets.

Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman revisits her past, turning to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home. In this luminous memoir, she asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments and explores how growing up estranged from the outside world shapes her as a parent today.

'A bold and intimate grappling with the hidden history at the heart of a childhood that was set up as a collectivist social experiment' EWAN MORRISON, author of How to Survive Everything

'Strikingly good' NOREEN MASUD, author of A Flat Place

'Crossman writes with such curiosity and heart-breaking honesty of what it is to find her own truth. I was enthralled by this book' LILY DUNN, author of Sins of my Father

'Beautiful, bold, tender. I loved this gorgeous memoir about making home' PRAGYA AGARWAL, author of Hysterical

© Susanna Crossman 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

 Cultural & Regional Philosophy Society Sociology Emotionally Gripping

Critic reviews

Vivid and painfully honest ... Painful to read but so beautifully done ... There's something of the Levy sensibility here. It's serious and poetic. It's delicate and wise. It's a multilayered excavation, a rich but also careful unfolding of the truth
Crossman's extraordinary memoir of the tyranny of her childhood is heartbreaking, eye-opening, and difficult to put down
Kindred as hell. Tell everyone you know to read this bonkers page-turner. I do.
Engrossing ... Examines philosophical and sociological perspectives on the meaning of home, giving insight into why utopias are unattainable
Ambitious, compelling ... The diarist’s sense of urgency and the child’s creative use of language have stayed with her, often producing vivid prose
I hugely admire Crossman’s resistance against the tyranny of it all – and her constant will to survive
Vivid and poignant ... A powerful memoir of a particularly unusual childhood ... Concrete, disturbing and moving
This isn’t a misery memoir. Crossman examines philosophical and sociological perspectives on the meaning of home, giving insight both into why utopias are unattainable and why we shouldn’t try to reach them in the first place
Brave ... While the author discourses intelligently on the abiding failures of utopias, and interweaves her own experiences as a therapist, I think the primary purpose of the book was to explore and thus exorcise her childhood demons. In this one can only hope she has been successful.
A bold and intimate grappling with the hidden history at the heart of a childhood that was set up as a collectivist social experiment. A true piece of work and one that is historically significant
All stars
Most relevant
I was riveted to this memoir. The writer has achieved something very few others have managed, which is to produce the memoir of a child. She has succeeded in channeling her past child in a way that most people can’t, assuming it to be easy. Her childhood was like many others, except that she grew up in an intentional commune whose founders had political and idealogical beliefs which they applied to their community. As with all social structures, there were good and bad outcomes for its members and the child’s point of view and lived experiences are, in my opinion, the very best of metrics. She recounts her experiences, building a wider context of sociology, politics, philosophy, etymology and theories of child development and therapy.
My principal enjoyment of her memoir is in the sense of radical hope that went as far as it could to genuinely create something positive. Communes are often slated and denigrated for their failures, and the term “social experiment” seems to be weaponised against the efforts so many good people have made to strive towards healthy egalitarian collectives. The book contains some accounts of the communes failures for sure. However, the positive outcomes are harder to understand or measure, so I was pleased to detect some important and meaningful threads in the writer’s experiences.
Another reviewer said they struggled with the narration, but I found it to be engaging and appropriate throughout.

Fascinating memoir of a radically hopeful attempt to build eutopia.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I gave this book a good go, but there is something odd with the narration, like it has no soul or meaning, very slow and monotonous.

Robotic reading, made an interesting story boring

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.